I was surfing the web today and I came across a blog post titled… I HATE Photoshop! He could actually have said – how my photographer ripped me off!
I thought her dislike of Photoshop made for an interesting headline so I read the post.
Turns out it was written by a bride who hired a photographer for her wedding – for 4 or 5 hours (she wasn’t sure how long in her words).
After the wedding, I got all the negatives. In her opinion, photographers who keep negatives and try to sell the photos later is a scam. By the way, giving negatives in the analog world is the same as giving them a memory stick or a photo CD file in the digital world.
So, I got all the negatives.
She had kept them, niggers, for so long—she didn’t say how long—because she had no retouching program. Finally got a copy of Photoshop. She was now “retouching” more than 500 black and white photos. (The photographer took half of the photo in black and white and the other half in colour.)
The reason she “hates” Photoshop is the boredom of retouching 500 photos! Hmmm… I have to wonder how good this photographer would be if she had to retouch them all! (Luckily, the software was given to her as a Christmas gift, so I guess she can’t hate it for the $600.00+ price tag!) She never mentions the steep learning curve or the time needed to do the retouching, or the cost of printer ink and photo paper, etc…
But … she was not “tricked” by some paparazzi! The person who actually paid $600 for the software took the time to learn how to use it, took the time to retouch all the photos, edit them, then pay to have them printed, and then take the time to put them together in an album. (We won’t even get into discussing the cost of equipment, training, and the hundreds of other miscellaneous details that went into creating the images in the first place.)
Yes… Photographers who really want to charge a fair price for their work – and not give it away – are a real scam! For those of you who don’t have a sense of sarcasm – I’m corny!
How many brides don’t actually get a wedding album because they want to save a few bucks and “print it themselves”? and never do? How many brides have had an album—but it sucks because they don’t have a $600 program? Or do you not have the knowledge, or will not take the time to do all the work?
As professionals, we know, or at least should know, the amount of work and effort that goes into creating a beautiful wedding album—or the hardcover books so popular these days. We know that brides rarely do the work required to do the job right and will end up with either no album or a sub-par album at best.
So when you take the easy way out and give the bride the negatives or the camera’s memory stick – or a CD, whatever, you’re really ripping it off. They will never get to see their album the way it should be seen or enjoy it the way it should be enjoyed. I deceived them. And they will never know!
By the way, you also deceived yourself. None of their friends or relatives will see your work as it should. Want your reputation and future bookings to depend on an amateur who “hates Photoshop?”
Me, no. Stand your ground and charge for your work, everyone will be better off for it.
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